Well-known climate change spokespeople Katharine Hayhoe and Leonardo DiCaprio tacitly endorse Obama’s terribly inadequate energy and environmental policies. The White House collaborated with DiCaprio and National Geographic to create the documentary “Before the Flood.” While the documentary is informative about the magnitude of the problem, the promo event for the film, held several weeks ago on the White House lawn, misleads its audience into believing that the Obama administration is actually doing much to address it.
The film likewise suggests that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were sincerely against climate change, and therefore must have done something about it when they were in office. Like much of the popular discourse, the film encourages a misguided hope that since Americans won’t change their lifestyles, technology will save us. The film also advertises for Tesla batteries and a carbon-offset scheme, Carbotax.org. While the batteries are touted as “clean,” the mining, manufacture, charging and decommissioning involved in their production and use give them a very large carbon and environmental footprint. Carbon-offset schemes are unverifiable and a false solution to the climate crisis. They often have the effect of increasing environmental destruction and injustice toward the true forest and earth protectors – traditional indigenous people.
In the promo event, these supposed authorities argue that fracking is a necessary evil, because natural gas is better than coal. Likewise for nuclear power. They ignore the fact that the government is totally subservient to its corporate masters and Obama’s lack of real leadership in motivating the US population to take climate change seriously. His excuse being that we just can’t disrupt people’s lives too much. Although he campaigned in 2008 on a platform that was firmly opposed to international “free trade” agreements, Obama now strongly promotes such horrendous agreements as the TPP and TTIP, which magnify the greatest underlying cause of global climate change: the predatory transnational corporate-controlled global economic system.
Obama postures as a green president, like he postured as a peace president while he escalated the war in Afghanistan. While he is an eloquent speaker and appears to be very nice person, his overriding legacy has been less privacy and freedom, more war and more environmental destruction in the US and around the world. I am fairly certain that Katharine Hayhoe and Leonardo DiCaprio have good intentions. But Obama is a paradox. He often delivers good rhetoric, but his actions often contradict his words. He may sincerely believe what is politically expedient for him to believe.
It seems ironic that both Obama and DiCaprio heap praises on 26th president Teddy Roosevelt, who is given credit for protecting wilderness, but in fact was a racist Indian-hater. See “Teddy Roosevelt Laid Bare.”
Obama finally agreed to stop the construction of the Keystone Pipeline after enormous pressure from activists, then when not many people were paying attention he allowed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). On his watch, we are witnessing tremendous police state oppression of heroic and peaceful native Americans, following in the footsteps of his predecessors like Teddy Roosevelt.